Jaromil on Thu, 23 Jul 2015 01:15:09 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Hacked Team [getting off-topic...] |
dear dv, I guess is entirely my fault calling such an OT by divagating... apologies for my sort-of-ranty way of being somehow wrong, passionate and definitely thinking like an old-fart about the present and future of net.art in the age of google-artists. On Mon, 20 Jul 2015, dvyng wrote: > Agree with the above - all of these get-tech-quick schemes for kiddie > coders are missing the vital ingredient of self-reflexivity, > particularly the willingness to even begin to explore the > politics/ethics of software/hardware development (similarly often with > digital/net/computer/etc art). nailed, both you and mp. I was indeed cross-referring the other thread and thinking of this "Internet Art" definition, how terrible that sounds to my ears. Really the best that could happen to all this was almost over 10 years ago and is best told by Josephine Bosma starting from gracious way of calling it net.art, perhaps she'll manage to add some of the present evolution of it now, but then it will be in relation to real art currents and not just media channels. There was a time in which a sort of artistic movement inherited critical elements from surrealism and situationism and brought them to this new condition of hyper-connectivity by exploring it with a critical eye: then bugs were aestethicized, a sort of arte povera aesthetic of bits and bytes was emerging and identity runners were formulating premotitions for the current state of social networking politics we face. Amazing. But what started to come after was either a repetition of all this, either tapestry and entertainment, with some exceptions, pranks and new art currents that deserve a better name, like glitch art. Now I think that if we are to look at some "Internet Art" we can use other classifications that really reflect on the art current and sensitivity and aesthetics rather than use industry standards to name an artistic period that does not really exists. Most "Internet Artists" today are incapable to start from the sort of telematic condition in which already at the very beginning Roy Ascott was able to see much more than any hacker can do now. Perhaps because this dimension now exists *too much* and all around us? or because it is too much of a business already - and much more, politics, warfare even. Perhaps we should all try to describe what we are doing with digital media without thinking about the specific medium being the message, but just a footnote about materials used. Or better, to quote Flusser, formulate the narrative before the production of technoimages, as it was even before photography, and so also analyse what art production really means, beyond its condition of reproduction and the changes in its market economy. Also I think nowadays (and again with a few exceptions) there is barely a collective dimension to what used to be an "artist international" as the surrealist, even the consciousness of it is missing. If we go on like this, "Internet Art" will just sounds like "Google Art" to me (and believe me Google is going around with initiatives for Google Artists now) something put together by marketing analysts on the shelves of a consumer-grade supermarket of special effects. In these regards I really appreciate what the "Critical Engineering Manifesto" tries to do, pity it is not managing to scale. Bad sign. > This fantasy of code being the benchmark for 21st child literacy is > nonsense when it exists in a space devoid of any context beyond a > purely info-capitalist economic one, where younger kid superstar > coders frantically develop yet more apps for $$$s, photocall posing > with grinning politicians, and thus becoming postergirls && boys > demonstrating how young people can be important/efficient contributors > to the national economy. Like Victorian Workhouses, but now in The > Cloud.* It comes to me in mind an excerpt of an essay by Jonathan Alex Gold written already more than 10 years ago, probably by the time GOOG was come to existance, this little pink fart floating in the sky of the Silicon Valley for a moment. Good read. Here all along I thought I was a scientist. I thought I was a philosopher. I thought I was a mathematician, studying algorithms and their proofs in the grand tradition of Euclid and Gauss and, of course, al Khwarizimi. I could have sworn that this is what I do. And yet, from what I can gather from the reports, and from what people tell me about myself, that's not it at all. It turns out that I'm a dot-com engineer. I was dumbfounded to learn this. Contrary to what I thought I was doing, I've actually been busy at work building something like "the new e-cyber-inter-web-world of tomorrow's technology of the present of the future." If you're unnerved by the fact that this phrase makes no sense to you, I can sympathize. After all, I'm apparently the one building it, and I don't even know what it is. In addition to this, it seems that, when I'm not busy working on "tomorrow's technology today", I'm hard at work all through the night in a small windowless room drinking tons of coffee and pursuing my dream of becoming the next Bill Gates, the next boy genius Napster start up internet toting computer whiz from next door, set to jump with software I wrote in my garage and rise to the head of a new empire, where I singlehandedly and in bona fide multithreaded fashion strike the ladies dead with my client-server savvy while wooing banks and various monied interests into my den of Dungeons and Dragons posters and subculture chat rooms where I tech-talk them into forking over their green with the promise of the next great i.p.o.-Nasdaq corn-fed sensation while simultaneously plotting to break in to their mainframes so I can get from there to the State Department in a zany madcap wily hacker plan to appoint Mickey Mouse as the national security envoy to Pakistan. I had no idea I was so busy and industrious. I'm tired just from reading about myself. I have lost a hold of my identity. It seems that it is now owned by Microsoft and Ebay, by Time and Newsweek, by Dateline and Intel. I try to think back, wondering if maybe I sold it to them and subsequently forgot about it. I've searched my soul for some record of the transaction, of some outright bill of sale, and I can't seem to find one. I've been trying to recall any particular times when maybe some misunderstanding could have occurred and these kinds of companies became under the impression that they were the owners of my identity. > *too far? ;P whopsie, I did far(t) too much. ciao -- Denis "Jaromil" Roio, Dyne.org Think (& Do) Tank We are free to share code and we code to share freedom Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org